I placed it back under the microscope and increased the magnification. The surface was much more polished than other pieces from the Gravettian period, but other than that there was every indication that it had been engraved in that period, just as Héctor had suggested. It was a naturalist figurine of a well-proportioned bison, but the figure of the bearded man on its back was unheard of, astounding. The piece represented a game, an irony, a lesson. A duality. Fortunately, the material seemed to be bone, so it would support carbon 14 dating. But apart from its significance, there could be dozens of reasons why Héctor had it in his pocket, why he refused to put it on display, despite the fact that doing so would launch the MAC into the pantheon of European museums.
But why deceive myself? Iago was absolutely right. The story of the longevos was way beyond me. To consider that Iago might be ten thousand three hundred ten years old turned him into . . . into what? An old man with the eternal appearance of a young man, or an eternal youth ten thousand years old. Unfortunately, what we had shared these last six months already seemed distant, the remote past, something irretrievable, and I was very conscious of that fact. Iago had once again hit the nail on the head: would I be able to go on working at the MAC under those circumstances? The old Dana would have started to make her escape ages ago. It would be safer and less messy, but it wouldn’t make sense. No matter where I went, I’d take those memories with me, and everything that had happened would fester forever. Iago’s story would turn into an obsession, just like the motive behind my mother’s death. There would be no way to fool myself; I’d always want to know the truth.
And the fact was that the few hypotheses I’d come up with contained too many weak points. Some important question was always left unexplained. On the other hand, the explanation that Iago and company were offering me was a stroke of genius because, by basing itself on the simple premise “we can’t age,” it satisfied each and every one of my unanswered questions.
I would respect Iago. I wouldn’t play dirty. I was tempted to send the molar for dating, but without his dental plaque it still wouldn’t prove anything. As to getting hold of organic samples from them and sending them off to some lab, I didn’t feel capable of doing it. Was I prepared to subject them to a possible risk in order to rid myself of my doubts? The outcome would be unpredictable. No, I wouldn’t do it. I’d have to learn to live with my uncertainty.
I’d sensed it once before, when I was hidden in a tunnel a few yards above my head, and now my suspicions were confirmed: whatever their secret might be, I was aware that I was playing a game with giants. So I turned off the light on the microscope, left the lab as I’d found it, and returned to Héctor’s office to give him back his amulet.
“Do you want to talk?” he asked me with a worried expression when I handed it over to him.
“No, boss. Not right now.”
An automaton left Héctor’s office, walked mechanically down the stairs, and spent the morning designing display panels.
38
IAGO
Mother Moon Day, the twenty-third day of the month of Uath
Monday, June 4, 2012
Okay, Flemming. I’m listening,” I said with some urgency once I was on my own back in my office.
“We can’t talk about this over the phone, Isaac,” he replied, his voice charged with emotion. “It’s too important. You have to get here as soon as you can.”
“So quickly?” I hadn’t been expecting him to call so soon; no way.
“It was easy once you’d put me on the right track.”
My pulse quickened as I listened to him. I wasn’t keen to travel again but I realized immediately that it was going to be necessary for me to go—and, moreover, with as little fuss as possible.
“Listen, I’ll catch the first flight to Copenhagen tomorrow. Don’t tell me anything now.”
“Isaac, I don’t know how I’m going to repay you.”
“You’ll find a way. Don’t worry about that for now, old friend,” I said to him with a hearty laugh and hung up.
For a short while, Flemming’s call changed the dark mood I’d been in for several days. Since . . . Oh well, what did it matter?
I booked the ticket online, then opened the door adjacent to mine—the one to my father’s office—and found him reading the book that Baltasar Gracián, the Jesuit philosopher, had given him as a gift over four hundred years ago. He only read it when he was worried. He didn’t look up when I came in.
“Come on, Héctor. We have to talk about a few things.”
“Is it urgent?” he asked me, pretending that he was concentrating on what he was reading.
“Definitely!”
Fifteen minutes later we arrived at the Somocueva headland in my car. From there you could see the whole coastline, and we could see anyone approaching us from some distance. Luckily, it was a weekday, and we knew we’d be on our own. We snaked our way in silence down the path that led to the beach.
“You shouldn’t have given her the bison,” I reproached him as soon as we hit the sand, while at the same time I picked up some round stones and hurled them furiously into the sea.
“Are you upset?” he asked.
“Somewhat.”
You have no idea how much.
“And now you’re going to give me a sermon about how I don’t see things your way,” I added, “but you’re meddling in something that only involves me, and I asked you yesterday not to do so.”
“From the moment you told her about all of us, it stopped being of concern only to you,” he replied gravely.
“And what did you want me to do? Adriana isn’t an illiterate peasant who’s satisfied with any old explanation.”
“We’ve been on the verge of being found out on several occasions, and we’ve always avoided trouble. Tell me, Son, if it had been anyone else at the museum, would you have revealed our secret to them?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Naluvara,” I said in my mother tongue without realizing it.
“Yes, you most certainly do know.”
You always hit the nail on the head, I had to admit. My father always beat me when it came to rhetoric.
“I’m not reproaching you for having told Adriana,” he continued in a more conciliatory tone. “What I’m trying to avoid is our losing control of the situation. You haven’t made it easy for her; you haven’t considered her character or her circumstances. You’ve only thought about your longing for her to believe you, period. You haven’t done a good job, Son.”
“Nor have you,” I said quietly, shaking my head. “The business of the bison has been of no use. That type of evidence won’t make her believe us.”
“Iago,” he said, coming to a halt, “today she came to offer her resignation.”
“What?” I exclaimed. I wasn’t expecting that.
“I gave her the bison to hang on to her.”
“A golden apple,” I said, thinking out loud.
My father nodded. “It’s working for now. We can’t risk having her go at this point, with everything you’ve told her, but no time to absorb it. We’d stop having news of her, but we’d always be wondering whether she was continuing to investigate us.”
“Even if she did that, Adriana would never betray us. She’s trustworthy.”
“I think she’s reliable, too, but obsessions are dangerous. We can’t leave a loose end of such caliber. I know my amulet is circumstantial evidence, and I’m not expecting that it will convince her, but I am confident that it will start to break down her orthodox scientist foundations a little. You’ll have to take care of the rest. You must give her time.”
“Time,” I repeated, spitting out that damned word. “Everything’s a question of time here. If it weren’t for time, we’d have been together right from the start.”
“You’re wrong. Thanks to time, you’ve been granted the possibility o
f meeting her. Ten thousand years separate you, but thanks to the mutation or whatever it is that makes us Ancients, you’ve survived long enough to get to know her. Time has favored you rather than the opposite. If it weren’t for time, you’d be Skeleton No. 7 from Monte Castillo as far as she was concerned, and she’d be examining your brain with latex gloves. That would be the maximum contact you could hope for. So don’t curse time, because we are its most privileged offspring.”
My father was in his purest form. No one contradicted him when he became philosophical. So I chose not to argue and allowed his soothing company to calm my soul.
We strolled to the end of the beach, relishing the sunny day, which foreshadowed a temperate summer, but midday was approaching, and other matters were calling for urgent attention.
“Let’s leave this topic for now,” I said finally. “I have to bring you up-to-date before I catch my flight tomorrow for Copenhagen.”
“What have you lost in Copenhagen?”
“Listen, there’s something I haven’t told you yet about the material I got from the Kronon Corporation. As soon as I managed to examine it, I began to form a theory. I didn’t want Kyra to reach the same conclusions as I had, so the material I passed over to her was fairly heavily censored. I have the impression that the explanation for our mutation might lie in telomeres, but I didn’t want to risk starting to investigate my theory blindly in the museum laboratory, so I came up with a way of testing my theory elsewhere.”
“Go on. So far I’m following you.”
“Years ago, when I set up my network of scientific contacts in order to initiate our research and get hold of equipment for the lab, I got in touch with Flemming Petersen, of the Institute for Studies in Progeria in Copenhagen. I’ve always thought that progeria—premature symptoms of aging in children, resulting in a life expectancy of thirteen years and the physical appearance of a ninety-year-old—is the opposite condition to ours. I thought his research might give us some clues, so I turned up at his laboratory in the identity of a wealthy father who’d lost his seven-year-old daughter to progeria and who was carrying out his own research. Since then we’ve been in regular contact. I spoke to him as soon as I returned from San Francisco. I explained my telomere theory to him, and he immediately began to check it out. He’s just called me and asked me to get there as soon as I can. I think he’s found something important.”
We’d reached the end of the beach some time ago and sat down on some dry rocks.
“First, explain your theory to me.”
“Well, what I found at the Kronon Corporation was something we’d overlooked so far. I suspect that the length of the telomeres is an indicator of your actual biological age: a child with progeria will have telomeres as short as those of an old person, and we longevos like those of a thirty-three-year-old. If Flemming can prove my theory, he can begin a new line of investigation that could lead him to applying telomerase and repairing cells as soon as progeria is diagnosed.
“However,” I added with a degree of caution, “I still don’t know if my theory is sound, and even if it were the case, it seems too simple to me. I suspect I’ve missed something, so we shouldn’t take anything for granted until Flemming explains to me what he has found, all right?”
“Fine,” said my father. “Then you should catch a flight as soon as you can. We’ll have to find some excuse for your absence from the MAC for a couple of days, and I’m a bit frightened of you flying alone again. If what happened to you in San Francisco recurs, then what?”
“I’ve already taken precautionary measures. I have instructions in my wallet and in my cell phone. I’ll tell you exactly where I’m staying and what I’ll be doing. On your side, call me every three hours. If it happens again you can catch the first available flight and come to get me, since I’m not on the other side of the Atlantic anymore. By the way, you come, not Jairo.”
He nodded his assent, although something was casting a shadow over his face.
“Tell me once and for all what’s bothering you,” I asked him.
“What are we going to do with Kyra and Jairo if your theory is correct?”
“The same thing we were intending to do in Florida with Ponce de León, had we found the Fountain of Eternal Youth: destroy the evidence and assure ourselves that that possibility will never again be considered. For now I intend to keep Kyra busy for years with all the new lines of investigation I can think of.”
“Stopgap solutions, Son. They’re only temporary remedies. A few years, a few decades. They’re a laughable delay for people like us. If telomeres really are the answer, she’ll end up making her way to the truth.”
“Well then, it’s better for us if she doesn’t even suspect it. We’ll chase down all the fashionable scientific theories of the twenty-first century. Eventually, they’ll fall out of favor, and Kyra will focus on the ones that follow. Imagine if the real cause of our longevity had been jade, cinnabar, or hematite, as the Chinese maintained three thousand years ago. If we’d discovered it back then and kept quiet, right now Kyra wouldn’t even be considering it. I’m hoping that’s exactly what will happen with the business of the telomeres, and that she keeps searching the most varied external elements in our genes that we, of course, don’t have.”
“I hope you’re right.”
I hope so, too, Father, because otherwise we’re going to find out exactly what an irreversible act is.
I returned to the MAC at midday, as I still had something to check before leaving for Denmark. As soon as I had assured myself that Dana’s car wasn’t in the parking lot, I went up the stairs to her office and examined the bookcase. I cleared away the books that were covering the false back and pushed.
Just as she had told me, a tunnel led down from there and disappeared into the darkness. I got into it and climbed down as far as I could, until I was level with Kyra’s lab. Beyond that point it was too dark to see anything. I assumed that the book Dana had lost was several yards farther down, and that the tunnel would have been sealed at some stage. But I decided to hide my knowledge of its existence from my family for now, especially from Jairo. When it came to him, I had developed the habit of always keeping an ace up my sleeve.
If my brother hadn’t told us that there was a secret tunnel in the building he himself had built and restored, there had to be some dark reason for it.
39
IAGO
Mars Day, the twenty-fourth day of the month of Uath
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
On my previous visits to Copenhagen, I had normally gone to the Institute for Studies in Progeria and talked with Flemming in his office there. The building was located in the southeast part of the city, in a place known as the Silicon Valley of Medicine. Pharmaceutical companies like Colzymes, Gencop, and Advantycs, where Flemming himself had an executive position, had installed themselves in that peaceful location, attracting the most renowned scientists of the region.
It was an area I had become accustomed to going back to ever since my mother, my father, and I had attempted to retrace the steps of her clan, making the return trip to the place she and her people had originally come from. It was impossible to know which had been the exact spot back in those times, with only the countryside and my mother’s limited memory as cross-references. Much later, in light of the most recent geological theories about the changes wrought by the last glacial period, the Würm glaciation, my father and I had surveyed the zone until we were reasonably certain that my mother had come from the very same lands that her son was now observing from the air. Nowadays, I completed the journey that had taken her so many years in a mere three hours ten minutes.
I followed the directions Flemming had given me—“Go toward the town of Jyllinge, about thirty miles from the Kastrup airport; ask to be taken to number 23 on Strandvejen, the beach road”—and arrived on time at the address.
The cab I caught at the airpor
t left me in front of a simple house of cherry-red wood with white corners and a gabled slate roof that competed with other, similar houses for the small amount of coastal space. The pure colors of those dwellings and the green of the woodlands behind them made me feel as if I were looking through a filtered lens. But there was no deceit or artifice involved. It might have been the clean air, or the fresh Danish morning, or the need to clear my mind of the gray storm clouds of Santander—I don’t know. But the change of air suited me, and this spot was tranquil, solitary, and remote from everything, like the peace of mind I’d been searching for lately.
I paid the cab driver more crowns than I’d expected and headed for the front gate, but I’d barely stepped into the garden when my feet sank into mud. The lawn was completely covered in it. I looked down at the layer of mud on my shoes in disgust. Then I raised my eyes and realized that the garden looked as if it had been bombed with half-melted slabs of ice. I finally made it to the front door and rang the bell, planning to greet Flemming with a complaint. It was the first time that we were meeting at his house rather than the Progeria Institute. I was convinced that the change of location had something to do with his phone call. When the door opened, rather than the chubby Danish scientist with his mop of curly blond hair that defied gravity, a girl with a sharp nose, huge eyes with no eyelashes, and a swollen skull confronted me. She was a teenager with progeria. She was wearing a down jacket and holding a blowtorch.
The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 1) Page 30